Benchmarking winnfsd vs VirtualBox Shared Folders

Benchmarking winnfsd vs. VirtualBox Shared Folder I/O

Update - March 1, 2018: VirtualBox 5.0.2 provided performance improvements to native VirtualBox sharing (vboxfs). However, I have not re-benchmarked since.

Note: In these benchmarks, I have ignored tests where the record size is less than the file size, and I am only showing cases where record size equals file size.

read and reread compared

NFS read and reread performance is extremely high (so much so that other statistics are dwarfed).

NFS read and reread ignored

NFS read and reread are allowed to go off the chart, so that the other stats can be compared.

Conclusion

NFS dwarfs vboxsf's read/reread performance, while in other I/O tests, vboxsf outperforms NFS.

Unfortunately, there are pros and cons to each of the many host/guest file sharing solutions--even more than I had anticipated. For my needs, NFS would seem to perform best, but if I were looking at development of another type (where, say, writes were more important), I'd stick to VirtualBox shared folders (or some other solution).

Follow-up

I began to investigate this plugin because I was having very slow start-up times of my local web application (a Lucee application). With code in a VirtualBox shared folder, my site started in 390s, and restarted in 330s. Now that I've switched to an NFS shared folder, the site starts in 45s and restarts in 27s.

Notes

iozone commands

NFS

sudo iozone -a -f /theshare/iozonetest -n 1k -g 128k -i 0 -i 1 -i 2 -i 3 -i 4 -i 6 -i 7 -i 8 -i 9 -i 10 -i 11 -i 12 -U /theshare -Racb /vagrant/iozone_nfs_2.xls

vboxsf

sudo iozone -a -f /theshare/iozonetest -n 1k -g 128k -i 0 -i 1 -i 2 -i 3 -i 4 -i 6 -i 7 -i 8 -i 9 -i 10 -i 11 -i 12 -U /theshare -Rab /vagrant/iozone_vboxsf_2.xls

References

• This started out as issue #46.